It has indeed been a pleasure and a privilege to work with one of the greatest thinkers of our age, and let me tell you that at 82, he’s still a force with which to be reckoned. While I won’t divulge much of our discussions here given they’ll appear soon-ish in the book, I did want to raise one subject that I think we all need to think about a little more.

The issue is what we, as ecologists (I’m including conservation scientists here), choose to study and contemplate in our professional life.

I’m just as guilty as most of the rest of you, but I argue that our discipline is caught in a rut of irrelevancy on the grander scale. We spend a lot of time refining the basics of what we essentially already know pretty well. While there will be an eternity of processes to understand, species to describe, and relationships to measure, can our discipline really afford to avoid the biggest issues while biodiversity (and our society included) are flushed down the drain?

I’m referring specifically to the big ‘sustainability’ issues of our era. This include inter alia increasing agricultural production without further destruction of ecosystem integrity, low-impact energy provision for electricity and fuels, human overpopulation and how to reduce it ethically and fairly, and massive ecosystem restoration at scales that are meaningful to prevent the greatest number of extinctions. There are many other areas, of course. While we argue about where to put the next protected area (when we know that these will never be enough), about how many individuals need to be maintained to ensure some acceptable probability of persistence, or that such-and-such logging process does more damage than another, we are losing our forests, coral reefs, climate regulation and food-production efficiency with increasing speed. Clearly what we’re doing is not working.

These are complicated issues, and usually take many other disciplines and experts to tackle simultaneously for meaningful outcomes. I wouldn’t expect a single PhD thesis could do any of these topics real justice, but embedded within a larger framework of multidisciplinary approaches could given even a dissertation a lot more relevance in today’s world.

I think that most of us – as do most people – become comfortable with what they know, and therefore spend most of their physical and contemplative time refining their area of expertise. Instead, I think more of us should jump out of our comfort zones and learn a little physics, engineering, climatology, economics and political science to expand our rather limited world view. With even a little more effort here, I think ecologists would be far more relevant and successful in turning some of the threatening unsustainability tide back towards more acceptable outcomes.

Of course, there are many ecologists who do at least attempt to address some of these issues, and for that I applaud them. However, it is telling when you take a close look at the themes, symposia and subjects of presentations at pretty much any ecology-based organisation or society meetings. You will notice that for the most part, few of them come even remotely close to tackling the sustainability topics described above. I’ve even witnessed first hand the refusal of such topics to be considered for ecological meetings when proposed, for the lame reason given that they are not strictly ‘ecological’? What navel-gazing and ultimately, society-screwing rubbish!

I won’t pretend to claim that I’ve abided by this advice for much of my career – it’s mainly a realisation that has come after building a foundation of ecological science in arguably more mundane and peripheral areas of the discipline. That said, I do not think it represents merely my own maturation and the benefit of hindsight and some degree of previous success – the issues that we need to dissect and solve are becoming more and more serious every year. My advice is therefore perhaps directed more to the newer generations of ecologists; I strongly contend that it will be essential that you take a practical and big-picture approach to your studies and career path over the next several decades. If you don’t, and solutions are not forthcoming, we are well and truly buggered.

It will take some rather lateral, out-of-the-box thinking on your part to get to grips with these issues, and to engineer solutions that are meaningful at large (including global) scales. We can no longer afford merely to refine our documentation of the planet’s demise. If you have the option, try to make your research more relevant for society than merely documenting the continuing loss of our natural capital and life-support system.

8 responses

[…] As our addled life-support system (spaceship Earth) is stressed further and further by our insatiable lust for resources, exacerbated by a continually rising population (7 billion and growing), quantifying these links is become more essential each day. More importantly, finding ways to reverse the damage is an implicit component of ecology. So I argue quite strongly that ecology is now possibly one of the most ‘important’ science disciplines because it is the only scientific line of inquiry that deals with these planetary-wide problems for humanity. Of course, agriculture, economics and energy provision are inter alia part of this equation, so healthy doses of multi- and transdisciplinarity are essential additions to the ecological toolbox. […]

[…] great that we have so many keen students wanting to save species x, y and z, but to be honest, much of the current conservation research being done merely confirms what we already know well. A challenge to both established and up-and-coming conservation scientists is to break out of the […]

Most people will prioritize what is good for their personal interest. For most ecologists, that’s their family and linked to that, career advancement. They are not any worse or better than the average person. If small issues get them papers, grants and promotions, and if dealing with big issues are risky career-wise, then most people will focus on small issues until they feel secure enough in their career that they can focus on the big issues and ask others to do the same. And just like most people, ecologists and conservation biologists, be they in universities, the government or NGOs, can be competitive, do not collaborate enough and often duplicate and/or undermine each others’ efforts to advance their own interests. Unless the system concretely rewards big-thinking and genuine collaboration, not much is going to change. I think your average ecologist, just like your average person, feels that losing one’s job or not advancing in their career is still a bigger disaster personally than the earth warming by 10 C or population doubling by the end of the century. Call my cynical but that’s what I am observing.

I think you are on the right path here Corey, but I don’t know how to get people interested. Conservationists love campaigns or demonizing politicians. I want people to think about the drivers and system failures that threaten conservation. Population growth is one of these, as is economic growth. Without addressing these our efforts are futile.